MAP Testing Next Week!

Language Arts

A quick announcement before we review our week: Students will be taking their MAP Reading test on Tuesday, September 19th during Language Arts class.  Please help your student prepare for success by making sure they eat a healthy breakfast and get a good night of sleep.

This week in Language Arts, we looked at reading actively based on "how stories go".  We recognized that we are expert readers who have learned certain patterns about a story and its structure.  As a result, we can read with anticipation using those patterns as a means of responding to our reading. We also looked at the art of retelling.  We are very familiar with retelling with an event focus.  However, this often doesn't reflect the sort of reading work we are doing.  Instead, when we retell, we want to focus on the work we have been doing or a goal we have set such as a character, theme, change, or symbolism focus.  Students got to practice this with a partner.

On Sunday, I will be collecting student notebooks and the short story they have been reading.  I will be responding to those responses to see what sort of reading strengths students have as well as proposing next steps.

Students should be continuing to record their reading on their reading log.  We will be analyzing that data soon!

Social Studies

In Social Studies this week, students were focused on writing their scripts and recording their podcasts.  We learned about the basics of Garage Band (the app we will be using) and created practice podcasts.  We also looked at thought prompts we could include in our script to make the link between our observations and our inferences clear to the listeners.  Next week we will listen to the podcasts and use a text set to gather additional information about hominids.